ABSTRACT
In texts ranging from the mid-Victorian Wuthering Heights through to the High Victorian Black Beauty to the early Edwardian Green Mansions, the imperialist encounter between English male aggressor and colonized people is figured in animal metaphor. Perhaps the most frightening of the Rudyard Kipling stories that negotiate the imperial encounter is "The Mark of the Beast". This chapter attempts to some patterns in the representations of imperial encounter in the shape of the beast. In some late Victorian narratives, the eroticized beast that is the site of imperial encounter is a human being defined by the English oppressor only as an animal. Late Victorian and early Edwardian texts continued to depict the imperial encounter in images of the animal. Perhaps the consummate expression of the tension between animal and man in the Victorian imperial encounter is this act: the English earl/ape-man refuses to be an imperialist.
